Cixin Liu
[isbn]
The Three Body Problem is hard sci-fi — the kind of hard sci-fi that will leave you puzzling over astrophysics and researching the particulars of quantum mechanics for days — but the patient reader will be rewarded with a dazzling epic full of mystery and moral dilemma. Liu grapples with the darkness of humanity, but leaves room for hope that someday we will fling ourselves out into space, into a vast life that only visionary sci-fi... (read more)
Recommended by Emily B.
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Michael J. Hathaway
[isbn]
The second book in a planned trilogy (following the excellent The Mushroom at the End of the World by Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing), What a Mushroom Lives For explores the world created by the interplay between matsutake and the people, plants, and animals who are shaped by them. The world of fungi is fascinating and Hathaway is a wonderful guide.
Recommended by Emily B.
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Erin Gleeson
[isbn]
Erin Gleeson's Forest Feast books are half-cookbook half-artbook and full of tasty vegetarian recipes that are simple enough for a weeknight, but so visually appealing they will take pride of place on your Instagram feed. Her latest edition to the series showcases gorgeous recipes and locations from around her home state of California.
Recommended by Emily B.
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Yoko Tawada, Margaret Mitsutani
[isbn]
A mélange of overlapping stories, a deft exploration of culture and identity, a near-future climate change parable, a love letter to linguistics, Scattered All Over the Earth defies easy description, but it is never anything less than completely absorbing and thought-provoking. Yoko Tawada has reinvented eco-dystopia.
Recommended by Emily B.
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Mariana Enriquez and Megan McDowell
[isbn]
Enriquez's short stories are fantastically macabre and suffused with menace. A dead child haunts the living, an ancient evil suffocates its host with anxiety and dread, a teenage obsession turns murderous. Like the best gothic fiction, the darkness of the real-world bleeds into the supernatural and leaves the reader off-kilter.
Recommended by Emily B.
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Olga Tokarczuk
[isbn]
Don't be intimidated! The Books of Jacob isn't a novel, it’s a world inhabited by a panoply of indelible characters. Are you a history buff? A lover of masterful world building? A spiritual seeker? An appreciator of deft, clever translation? Read this book. 900 pages is somehow almost too short.
Recommended by Emily B.
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Danny Caine
[isbn]
From cloud computing services and security systems to movie production and book publishing, the everything store is inescapable. Whether you think the Big Tech oligopoly is terrifying or benevolent, we all need to understand the power and pitfalls of the everything store’s inescapable reach. Even if How to Resist Amazon and Why doesn't convince you to give up your Prime subscription, reading Caine's urgent polemic will give you crucial... (read more)
Recommended by Emily B.
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Merlin Sheldrake
[isbn]
Reading Merlin Sheldrake feels like getting a personal tour of the most overlooked kingdom of life from an enthusiastic expert. Helpfully illustrated and full of fascinating stories, Entangled Life is the perfect introduction to mycology for a lay reader. You will never look at fungi the same way again.
Recommended by Emily B.
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Philipp Dettmer
[isbn]
As someone living with an autoimmune disease, I've long had a love-hate relationship with my immune system, but I've rarely thought about the system as a whole. Dettmer rectified that. Immune is an engrossing illustrated primer on the wonders and horrors of the immune system that will leave you with a new appreciation for the human body.
Recommended by Emily B.
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David Graeber, David Wengrow
[isbn]
David Graeber passed away in 2020, but before his untimely death he left us with this final gift. Expertly finished by his coauthor David Wengrow, The Dawn of Everything reimagines the human story from its earliest beginnings. Easily one of my favorite books of the year, every chapter left me with something to chew over. This is one of those books that will challenge you to reconsider everything.
Recommended by Emily B.
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adrienne maree brown
[isbn]
Brown has emerged as a powerhouse of the social justice movement in recent years. Her fiction debut is a bleak, haunting exploration of loss, grief, and anger shot through with resilience and hope. Like all of her works, Grievers explores how we work to create a world in which we want to live.
Recommended by Emily B.
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Rebecca Solnit
[isbn]
A contemplation on the life of one of the 20th century's greatest essayists, journalists, and truth-tellers by one of the 21st century's greatest? I'm in! I dropped everything on my TBR with plans to fly through it in a weekend, but quickly slowed down because this is an adroit, scholarly collection that deserves to be savored with deliberative reflection.
Recommended by Emily B.
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AI Weiwei and Allan H. Barr
[isbn]
A powerful and absorbing look at life in China before, during, and after the Cultural Revolution. Whether you are familiar with his work as an artist, human rights activist, and dissident or not, Weiwei will leave you with a new understanding of the importance of art, particularly in the face of repression.
Recommended by Emily B.
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Azareen Van der Vliet Oloomi
[isbn]
Philosophical and introspective rather than plot-driven, Savage Tongues is a cerebral excavation of the interlacing violences of immigration and dislocation, Islamophobia and racism, sexual violence and predatory men. Oloomi’s writing is beautiful and meditative even while it is decimating. A difficult but salient exploration of trauma.
Recommended by Emily B.
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Ash Davidson
[isbn]
Davidson speaks to my soggy, PNW-born soul. The clarity and empathy with which she writes about a coastal Pacific Northwest logging town and its working-class residents left me feeling as though I had inhabited the world she created. Damnation Spring is a spectacular debut that will take a well-earned place in the pantheon of PNW and environmental classics.
Recommended by Emily B.
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Richard Adams
[isbn]
My dad used to read to me and my brother almost every night before bed, and those nights are some of my favorite childhood memories. Many of the books we read together have stuck with me through the intervening years, but I have particularly fond memories of listening to him read Watership Down. 25 years later, I can still remember the feeling of being completely absorbed in the story. I was so enthralled that, when he had to go on a... (read more)
Recommended by Emily B.
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Tracy K. Smith and John Freeman
[isbn]
Drawing parallels between the summers of 2020 and 1964, the award-winning author, poet, and memoirist Smith brings together 40 incomparable voices to anthologize the Freedom Summer of 2020. Poignant and powerful, There's a Revolution Outside memorializes a cultural turning point and galvanizes the reader to keep fighting for justice after the summer ends.
Recommended by Emily B.
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Nicholas D Kristof and Sheryl Wudunn
[isbn]
From Hillbilly Elegy to Janesville, books purporting to explain the decline and polarization of rural America and the white working class have proliferated in the 21st century. Tightrope rises above the pack with its compassionate portrayal of its subjects, careful research, intersectional analysis, and thoughtful policy solutions. Focusing on the lives of Kristof's childhood peers in the working-class town of Yamhill,... (read more)
Recommended by Emily B.
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Barry Lopez
[isbn]
It feels reductive to call Barry Lopez's work nature writing. He had a gift for taking the awe that the natural world can inspire and distilling it into prose. It is difficult to choose just one of his books to recommend — read them all! — but Arctic Dreams is exceptional. Epic in scope and execution, it covers every aspect of the Arctic: its Native peoples, flora, fauna, geology, explorers, climate. In Lopez's skilled hands the barren... (read more)
Recommended by Emily B.
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Tamim Ansary
[isbn]
If you, like me, received an American public school education, the history of the world you learned probably began with Ancient Greece and the Roman Empire, proceeded through the rise of Christianity, the European "Dark Ages" and Renaissance, and concluded with a series of world conflagrations and the rise of the US as a superpower. This version of history relegates Eastern history to a bit part in the West's Grand Story of Conquest and Triumph... (read more)
Recommended by Emily B.
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Svetlana Alexievich and Bela Shayevich
[isbn]
In the Western consciousness, the disintegration of the Soviet Union was defined by one moment, the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 — the Cold War, and freedom, were won, roll credits — but the reality was far more complex. To the Soviet people, what the Western powers epitomized as the final triumph of liberal democracy was, for better or worse, a massive and ongoing rupture, a complete disintegration and reformation of their beliefs, values,... (read more)
Recommended by Emily B.
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Richard Adams
[isbn]
My dad used to read to me and my brother almost every night before bed, and those nights are some of my favorite childhood memories. Many of the books we read together have stuck with me through the intervening years, but I have particularly fond memories of listening to him read Watership Down. 25 years later, I can still remember the feeling of being completely absorbed in the story. I was so enthralled that, when he had to go on a... (read more)
Recommended by Emily B.
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Alex Michaelides
[isbn]
This clever campus murder mystery thriller is a satisfying follow-up to The Silent Patient. Michaelides builds an aura of menace while throwing out enough red herrings to make the big reveal surprising and satisfying. The intriguing characters and expertly woven-in Greek mythology keep The Maidens engrossing, even for readers who aren't psychological thriller devotees.
Recommended by Emily B.
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Peter Wohlleben and Jane Billinghurst
[isbn]
The Heartbeat of Trees is a love letter to the forest. Rejecting the credo that humankind has caused too much damage to ever restore our ties with nature, Wohlleben draws on recent scientific studies to show how intensely we are connected to the natural world even now — and how vital that connection will be for the battle ahead.
Recommended by Emily B.
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Michael Moss
[isbn]
Moss exposes how the food industry uses our own psychology and biology to manipulate us, habituating consumers to processed food and destroying our health in the process. An infuriating look at the severely underregulated food industry and required reading for understanding why American life expectancy is declining.
Recommended by Emily B.
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Michelle Nijhuis
[isbn]
Read Nijhuis if you want to understand the conservation movement and its key figures. A dense but deeply important read, Beloved Beasts depicts the triumphs without papering over the racism and colonialism that have always been deeply intertwined with the movement.
Recommended by Emily B.
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Elizabeth Kolbert
[isbn]
Kolbert turns her attention to the environmentalists, scientists, and activists who are working to mitigate the damage that human control of nature has caused, to take "control of the control of nature." The result is a hopeful book that highlights the efforts already underway without losing sight of the frightening scope of the challenge.
Recommended by Emily B.
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Jenny Odell
[isbn]
In 2020, we were forcibly thrust into the long-promised future of virtual hyper-connectivity. Given this new landscape, Jenny Odell's perceptive analysis of the anxious routines of our online lives has taken on new meaning. Going beyond simple critique, she offers a considered framework for reimagining our relationship with the virtual and the real.
Recommended by Emily B.
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Michael E. Mann
[isbn]
Fossil fuel companies and politicians beholden to business interests have waged a propaganda war, transforming climate change in the public imagination from the urgent responsibility of governments and corporations into an issue of personal responsibility. In The New Climate War, Mann reveals the inner machinations of this war and empowers readers to fight back.
Recommended by Emily B.
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Simon Winchester
[isbn]
Winchester's ability to take vast historical subjects and transform them into lucid and compulsively readable narratives makes his writing a joy to read. In Land, Winchester dives into the history of property ownership, combining hundreds of years of well-researched history with entertaining anecdotes that illuminate and humanize historical figures and moments from around the globe.
Recommended by Emily B.
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Adam Cohen
[isbn]
In Supreme Inequality, Cohen makes a convincing argument that for 50 years the courts have been a centerpiece of Republican strategy, and the increasingly conservative Supreme Court has prioritized corporate interests and the wealthy while giving short shrift to marginalized groups. Its decisions have directly helped to create the deep inequalities existent in our country today. With a new, extremely conservative justice confirmed, this... (read more)
Recommended by Emily B.
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Karen Russell
[isbn]
This is a deeply unsettling novella that makes for particularly foreboding reading during our current pandemic. Sleep Donation was first published in 2014, but from the view point of 2020, it reads less like an imagined dystopia and more like a thinly veiled rebuke of late-stage capitalism, corruption, exploitation, and the federal pandemic response.
Recommended by Emily B.
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Tina Ontiveros
[isbn]
Ontiveros's memoir of growing up in an itinerant logging family details intergenerational poverty, abuse, trauma, addiction, and violence, but is also fully infused with a deep familial love. Set in the small, often forgotten logging towns of Washington and Oregon in the ’70s and ’80s, rough house is a daughter's fraught, compassionate reckoning with her abusive, mercurial, loving father.
Recommended by Emily B.
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Isabel Wilkerson
[isbn]
Pulitzer Prize-winning author Isabel Wilkerson pulls back the American myth of meritocracy and reveals a rigidly hierarchical caste system with roots that date back to Jamestown. A masterly examination of the deeply rooted systems of power encoded in every facet of American life, and a thought-provoking exploration of the parallels between the American caste system and those of India and Nazi Germany. Caste is necessary reading for... (read more)
Recommended by Emily B.
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Nguyễn Phan Quế Mai
[isbn]
This English-language debut by Vietnamese poet Nguyen is a story of familial love, kindness, and perseverance that never loses sight of the violence, displacement, and intergenerational trauma inflicted on the Vietnamese people. Necessary own-voices reading for people, like me, who grew up learning about Vietnam only through the lens of war.
Recommended by Emily B.
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Brian Greene
[isbn]
On a journey from the Big Bang to the likely entropic death of our universe, Greene reminds us that we are nothing more than bundles of particles created through natural selection and random chance, beholden to nature’s laws — but there is infinite beauty in the meaning we create in the space in between.
Recommended by Emily B.
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Nicholas D Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn
[isbn]
The rapid disappearance of blue-collar jobs, combined with years of policy failures, has left working-class communities devastated. The social fabric has come apart and “deaths of despair” from suicide, alcohol, and drug abuse are on the rise across rural America. Through the stories of Kristof’s childhood peers in Yamhill, Oregon, Kristof and WuDunn detail 50 years of working-class decline with compassion, and recommend policy solutions.
Recommended by Emily B.
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Paul Theroux
[isbn]
Prodigious travel writer Paul Theroux never fails to entertain and inform, but his journey through Mexico is particularly prescient. An insightful, compassionate, and nuanced exploration of an oft-vilified country and people, On the Plain of Snakes is necessary reading for anyone seeking to make sense of our current cultural flash point.
Recommended by Emily B.
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Timothy Egan
[isbn]
On a spiritual journey across 1,000 miles of Europe and 2,000 years of Christian history, Timothy Egan reckons with his skepticism and lapsed Catholic beliefs while confronting a bigger question: What is the role of religion in a world that is rapidly losing its faith?
Recommended by Emily B.
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